It's the morning of July 4, and I thought a few reflections on patriotism might be in order.

What does patriotism mean to you? I'm interested not only in how you define it intellectually, but how you feel it emotionally. Do you get goose bumps when you see your country's flag, whether it's the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack or another?

For me on that point, it depends on the context. If the context is some media-manufactured moment on television, a moment when television is trying to manipulate or enforce our responses, like the unfurling of a field-sized flag during pre-game sporting festivities, I (like a lot of people) smell that from a mile away, and it tends to defeat other feelings.

But if I'm in a situation where I'm permitted a more personal response, where some packager of images isn't trying to wheedle a certain kind of reaction out of me and millions of others, then yes, I absolutely do get goose bumps. Contemplating a single flag by myself as I did at Appomattox last summer, for example. At Appomattox, even the horrid Stars and Bars was mildly moving.

I love my country very much. I treasure the genius of its founding – the Enlightenment principles, and the conviction that there would be no test for citizenship beyond fealty to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (not everyone today accepts that these should be the only tests, but they are).

Those principles have faced assault many, many times, and of course as a nation we haven't always lived up to them; indeed, we didn't from the start, and the stain of slavery and its legacy will probably never go away. Even with a black president, we still see that race is the central fact of American politics on a more or less weekly basis.

One hundred years ago today, there was a big heavyweight fight, between Jack Johnson and James L. Jeffries. Johnson was black. He'd won the heavyweight title two years before, defeating a Canadian. The idea that the heavyweight champion of the world was a black man was too much for the America of 1910.

Everyone knows the phrase "great white hope"; it originated then, and it was coined by none other than Jack London, whose socialist politics did not prevent him from believing that it was a crime against natural order that the world's boxing champ was a black man. Jeffries came out of retirement, saying he felt "obligated to the sporting public at least to make an effort to reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race."

Johnson won the fight. In some cities, as black residents celebrated, racial riots ensued, and about two dozen black people were killed. On Fourth of July weekend (the US, in fact, has a bit of a history of race riots on and around Independence Day, like this time). The fight had been filmed, and Congress passed a law banning the interstate transport of boxing films, lest white citizens around the country became too perturbed.

Is it upsetting that I dwell on this negative story on a day like today? This brings us to another problem. "My country right or wrong" has always been around, but it usually wasn't a very powerful position until just recently. As long as the wrong people don't get hold of the history books, Bush's with-us-or-against-us posture will go down in history as infamous, un-American, completely at odds with this nation's greatest principles, which include the necessary questioning of such stark absolutes.

I never take it for granted that I live in a society where I'm free to say all this. Lots of people don't. The point, to me, is not only that we appreciate that right, but that we use it to make a more perfect union as we see it. That's what our intellectual forbears in both our countries would want, and it's what love is.